


Crossroads

by Meltha



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: 500 words, Gen, I-must-be-crazy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-06
Updated: 2011-11-06
Packaged: 2017-10-25 18:51:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meltha/pseuds/Meltha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A 500-word look at Gunn's moral plight in season 5.  There's something missing in this fic...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: All characters owned by Mutant Enemy. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is made from this work of fiction.

Wolfram and Hart isn't so bad, or so Gunn thinks. Hardly a day slips past without an original crisis popping up. Back in days long ago, Gunn would worry things would start to fall apart, but that wasn't what was in his mind now. Laws, trials, jargon: millions of things occupy his mind now. Moral ambiguity didn't worry him much today.

Confusion and panic don't knock on his door at night. Horrifying visions of a world about to stop don't haunt him on his pillow as Gunn drifts off. All is straightforward again, just as it was for him in childhood. Right and wrong. Good and bad. Notions that hold no import with him.

Doors in his mind stand ajar now as music from long ago fills his brain. Constant rhythm fills his thoughts. Pianos shrilly play a saga of a soul lost and found again, all to a primal drumming of timpani. Gunn won't think on it too long, though. It's not his job. His job is only to find a way for many guilty to run away from swift, harsh castigation. His pursuit of all of a thousand various ways to fool law and civilization is in his blood, shrilly crying to fight against what Gunn knows is right.

But Gunn is at his most fatally brutal as rivals spring forth to accost him. A youth of fighting in urban brawls, both physical and spiritual, sings within him to a music only that man can know. If a horror from his past slips from dark shadows to bully him into panic or chaos, Gunn will smash it to bits without strain.

Wolfram and Hart is not stupid. Gunn was who was most apt to fall. No family waits for him. No girl warms his soul in cold hours surrounding dawn. No soft words call him back from a brink of an abyss of apathy. Of all, this man has nothing to part with now: a plan worth gloating about.

So Gunn falls into a trap of his own unhappy choosing. Lilah Morgan was his twin long ago. That girlchild was a plaything for Wolfram and Hart until at last Lilah was as lacking in pity as a cold and biting north wind. Gunn may hold much in common with that lost soul. Holtz lost his way too, pursuing a just conclusion but losing his humanity. Gunn will soon trod a path known by Darla and Drusilla, turning his back on humans and fashioning his days as a man worthy of living though many should fall at his whim.

But this man is not walking that pathway just now. Many footfalls must sound still until Gunn is lost to all. Soon a clock will harshly call him forth, and Gunn must know his wish for which road to go on. Until an hour of figuring his morality lands at his foot, Gunn is still sound in mind and soul. But can a warrior stay that way for good?

**Author's Note:**

> Excluding the disclaimer and summary, this ficlet does not use the letter e. Written in answer to my own challenge at the now-defunct 500 Club.


End file.
